A third of peoplechanged their travel habits during the London 2012 Games which helped with thesmooth running of services.

This included going
to different stations and staying at home, according to Mark Evers, Transport
for London's (TfL) director of Games transport.

He told the London
Assembly's transport committee that about a third of people were doing
something different.

He said a lot of
that third were people who were travelling at a different time of day so they
were able to avoid travelling at busy times.

"People were
also using different modes of transport and different stations," he said.

He cited the
example of someone who prior to the Games might have looked at using St James's
Park station in central London, but got off at Victoria to walk the rest of the
way.

Despite the smooth
running of services during the Games, partly linked to the £7.2 billion
invested in transport and infrastructure, more work needs to be done on making
the transport accessible to people with disabilities.

Record numbers of
passengers travelled in London during the Olympics - with 60 million journeys
made on the Tube alone, up 30% on normal levels.

Normally
frustrating links between different transport companies were overcome for the
Games, leading to plans that can be used to deal with major events and when the
city is struck by bad weather.

It is likely the
bold magenta signs will appear again at big events such as New Year's Eve, the
committee heard.

More work will be
needed into what people with disabilities thought about standards of travel.

TfL board member
Baroness Grey-Thompson said: "It would be a shame if it was a one-off and
they (people with a disability) only thought that the transport was that good
because it was Games-time."

There were 16
stations with temporary manual boarding ramps on the TfL network that were very
useful throughout the Games but are now set to be stripped out.

There are another
17 stations on the network where ramps would be a huge boost to accessibility,
the committee heard.

Baroness Grey-Thompson
said: "It would be fantastic if they could stay on. It needs to be
available and used so nobody gets left on the next station.

"Use away from
the Games is quite different. I would not want to raise people's expectations
post-Games and they found themselves not able to get on or off at a
station."

Dave Ward, Network
Rail's Olympic delivery director, noted that a helicopter was sent 380,000
miles out of Southend Airport during the Games to inspect infrastructure.

The information
gained from the bird's-eye view, in addition to manual inspections, helped to
shape and make their engineering plans more flexible.

"What the
Games has shown is that is we are prepared to look at different ways a whole
host of opportunities emerge," Mr Ward said.